However, sometimes the hero can respond with, "I don't like those choices, I'm taking a third option!" It is usually something completely unorthodox or seemingly suicidal. Yet this typically turns out to be the best choice after all, Everybody Lives, and the day is saved completely.

In general, a Third Option has three basic requirements needed to seem plausible: time, resources, and knowledge. A Third Option is useless if you don't have time to implement it, don't have (usable) resources/power, or don't have knowledge of it. Depending on how well that rule is followed, the solution will usually either be incredibly awesome or incredibly stupid. Deciding which examples are which is an exercise left to the reader, although Foreshadowing possible answers can help win them over.

Examples:

In the early 90s, Miller Light had a television campaign based around this. For example in one 1993 commercial, a couple is arguing over whether to watch a dog show or drag racing. They then put Miller Light on top of the television, which apparently allows them to watch both. The result is more absurd than you'd expect.

One of the early Play Station Vita ads addresses the dilemma of gaming vs. leaving for work with the cross-play option:

"It's a problem as old as gaming itself. Stay home and just keep playing, or get to work on time so your coffee-breathed boss doesn't ride like you like a rented scooter."

(person stops playing on PS3, continues his game on his Vita while leaving for work) "Who says you have to choose?"

One Pepsi commercial in the Philippines has one of these. A guy travels down a road and encounters two stalled vehicles. One is owned by a couple of cute cheerleaders. The other belongs to a band, who offer an ice box with the titular product. There comes a dilemma on who will hitch a ride with the guy? The commercial shows three different options. All of them involve the guy getting the Pepsi.

One has the guy offer the band his car, then use the cold water of the ice box to get the cheerleaders' van to run again.

Another is for the cheerleaders to ride inside the car while the band set themselves on top of the roof (a dangerous choice especially once they encounter a sign bend low enough)

The third is that all of them lay down on the road and form HELP with their bodies while sharing Pepsi with one another. Near the end of the commercial, a helicopter can be seen.

An Old El Paso commercial has taken this to Memetic Mutation levels: A family is trying to decide whether to have hard or soft tacos. Cue the little girl saying "¿Por que no los dos?" ("Why not both?")

"Trusting Megatron doesn't seem a particularly wise course of action. And using this opportunity to escape is no alternative either - he still holds my comrades! I must think like a warrior, as Optimus Prime instructed me. I must think of a third option!"

In Lucifer, the titular devil is given two dilemmas in a row, as a ruse in which each choice will insult his hosts and give them an excuse to kill him. He's warned by one of their servants beforehand, and manages to come up with a solution to both of them.

Also at the end, God presents Elaine Belloc and Lilith two possible outcomes - that he would either destroy the Creation, which is crumbling in his absence, or restore it to as it was. Lucifer interferes and offers a third option: to do nothing - the most difficult thing for an omnipotent being. God accepts, and leaves Elaine to replace him as the power that binds the universe together.

Green Lantern Hal Jordan, in a story arc concerning the Star Sapphire, which had, throughout the arc, taken over both Carol Ferris, his perennial love interest, and Jill "Cowgirl" Pearlman, his current love interest. The Zamarons, who sent the Star in the first place, held them captive and had Hal choose which one to be his mate. In response, Hal kissed one of the Zamaron captors, causing the Star to bond with her, go berserk, and forcing the other Zamarons to take her home to remove the stone.

The panel where Hal kisses the Zamaron queen immediately found its way to the Internet with the caption "Hal Jordan Will Fuck Anything", and we're still having fun with that.

The third option was lampshaded in an earlier story arc where Kyle Rayner met up with a younger Hal Jordan. Kyle let the villain Sinestro go when he saved Hal instead of pursuing the villain. Hal admonished him by saying he let Sinestro trick him into making a choice when all he had to do was cut the ring-generated rope hanging Hal.

Subverted in the conclusion of Final Crisis:Rogue's Revenge when Libra forces Weather Wizard to either pledge allegiance to the Secret Society of Supervillains or watch Libra kill his son. In the end the kid still dies because Inertia gets fed up with the situation and blows him up. Even Libra is dumbfounded after this.

Jason: If you won't kill this psychotic piece of filth... I will. You want to stop me? You're going to have to kill me.

Batman: Stop this. Enough. You know I won't—

Jason: All you've got is a headshot. I'm going to blow out his addled, deranged brains out— and if you want to stop it... you're going to have to shoot me. Right in my face. [...] It's him or me. You have to decide.

[Batman sends the Batarang. Jason collapses.]

Joker: You got him!! You expert, rooting-tooting, eagle-eyed, goth marskman sonofa*** ! Ya banked that bat-thingie off the pipe!!! Oh, god!! I love it!! You managed to find a way to win... and everybody still loses!! Except me, my dark little pumpkin pies.

In IDW's Transformers, the defeat of Nemesis Prime leads to an entity called the Darkness to start possessing Optimus Prime. Galvatron gives Optimus a choice: throw himself into a sun before the Darkness takes away his free will, or give it to Galvatron. Optimus's choice? Give Galvatron the Darkness and throw him into a sun.

A comic from The Far Side has people discussing a glass that has water in half of it. One says, "The glass is half full!" One says, "The glass is half empty!" One says, "Half full... no, wait, half empty... no, wait..." And the last guy is shouting, "Hey! I ordered a cheeseburger!"

In The Sandman volume The Doll's House, Dream's sister-brother, Desire launches a Xanatos Gambit to hurt him by tearing apart his realm: during Dream's imprisonment, Desire discovered that the comatose Unity Kinkaid was a "vortex" (a mortal whose existence causes the Dreaming to break down, destroying the world unless he or she is killed,) but was currently harmless because she was unconscious. Desire secretly raped and impregnated the sleeping Unity, which, unbeknownst to Dream, caused the power of the Vortex to be passed on to Desire and Unity's granddaughter, Rose Walker. If Dream did not kill Rose, the vortex would tear apart the Dreaming, but if he had killed her then shedding the blood of a family member (even if he didn't know she was family,) would have unleashed the Furies to ravage the Dreaming anyway. They end up taking a third option where the elderly and dying Unity is able to track down her granddaughter in the Dreaming and take the power of the vortex into herself again, and willingly lets Dream kill her and stop the vortex. Unusually for this trope, none of the characters were actually aware that they were foiling a plan; Dream only worked out Desire's machinations some time after the problem had been solved, and at the time all the various pawns thought that the existence of the vortex was simply a random occurrence that happened every eon or so.

Slade "Deathstroke" Wilson was supposed to choose between his professional honor as a hitman and his son's life; the enemy holding little Joey hostage wanted the information, really, but he hated Slade enough to be perfectly happy to kill the kid. Deathstroke tried to Take a Third Option and kill Jackal. Joey got his throat cut. And now you know why Jericho can't talk in Teen Titans.

Adeline Wilson shot her husband in the face and divorced him in reaction. And now you know why Deathstroke has only one eye. This kind of thing works better for heroes.

All-Star Superman: When Superman falls under the influence of black Kryptonite, the leader of P.R.O.J.E.C.T. suggests sending him to the Phantom Zone, an option that Jimmy Olsen refuses for being too permanent. At the same time, he can't run free. Jimmy's third option? Turning himself into Doomsday and fighting his corrupted friend to a standstill. He won.

In Fables, the North Wind faced a dilemma when he discovered that one of his grandchildren Ghost was a zephyr. Long ago he swore an oath to slay any zephyr he encountered. The North Wind knew that if he killed Ghost, he would forever alienate himself from his son (who already hated him) and his grandchildren. Faced with the impossible choice between breaking his oath and destroying his own family, the North Wind takes another option: he sacrifices himself to defeat Mr. Dark, both to save his son and his grandchildren and to free himself from his oath.

In Knightquest, the Jean-Paul Valley Batman chases down the serial killer Abattoir into a steel mill factory. In the chaos, Abattoir ends up falling down and is saved by a hanging chain dangling over a molten pit. The ghosts of Saint Dumas and Jean-Paul's father give him two choices: shoot him and let him die or fire his grappling line and try to save him. Torn between both actions, Jean-Paul chooses a third option: to walk away from it all and let them fight it out. This causes Abattoir to fall into the pit on his own.

Likewise, you have two (or more) continuities in a fandom and you like them both too much to disregard one canon entirely? Go with Patchwork Fic.

In Rise Of Empress Midnight, Twilight gives Midnight the option to either stay in her destroyed world or join Twilight and reform herself. Midnight instead calls for a third option and attempts to kill of Twilight and herself via the destroyed world.

Take A Third Option: Haruhi can't unbottle her feelings about the consequences of her powers because it will cause even more strain to others, and she can't ignore it either because she cares about the SOS Brigade. In order to prevent a Heroic BSOD she runs a Memory Gambit on herself so she doesn't destroy the world on an accidental whim.

In another HP fic, primum mobile, or ten forgotten things , Draco Malfoy realizes he may have moved he and Harry Potter to a reality where the Wizarding World does not exist as a subconscious example of Taking a Third Option:

'''The Dark Lord gave me two choices: one bad, the other worse. I suppose this is door number three.

In Rainbooms and Royalty, after Rainbow rejects Nightmare Moon's temptation, the dark alicorn, after restraining Fluttershy's wings and preventing Twilight Sparkle and Rarity from using their magic, hurls the Mane Cast sans Rainbow to their deaths. Nightmare Moon then taunts Rainbow to choose who to save, because as fast as she is, she can't save all of them. Rainbow manages to pull off a Sonic Rainboom for the first time since her fillyhood, and does fly fast enough to save all of them.

In the Digimon/Star Wars: The Clone WarscrossoverA Sticky Situation, Aayla is kidnapped by Cad Banes and questioned for useful information before he intends to kill her on Darth Sideous's orders. The clear choices are for her to submit to the torture and share a secret that could alter the entire war if the Separatist find out (and die) or remain silent while suffer intense pain at the hands of the bounty hunter (and die). Instead, because she has learned to think outside of the box thanks to her time with the digimon and tamers, she decides to pay her captor more than Darth Sideous did and have him both release her, keep the digimon a secret, and start working for the Jedi.

Justice League of Equestria: During the second arc of Mare of Steel, Brainiac sets up Rainbow Dash/Supermare with a Sadistic Choice: either save Cloudsdale from a bomb capable of destroying the whole city, or save Scootaloo from being electrocuted. Being a creature that runs on pure logic, Brainiac is unable to anticipate that Rainbow Dash would be unwilling to let either happen, and thus acting to prevent both.

Reimagined Enterprise: Meta-example. Many fans disliked the overly TNG-like aesthetic from Star Trek: Enterprise and most fan reimaginings give Enterprise a more TOS-like aesthetic instead. Rather than doing this, BlackWave instead created his own 22nd century aesthetic that's halfway between contemporary spacecraft like the Space Shuttle or Dream Chaser and TOS, logically enough.

During the events of The Teacher of All Things, Tai and the other V-Tamers are left with a conundrum: When you can't get to Odaiba because the bridge has collapsed and the waters are too full of enemies to swim- not that Greymon are great swimmers anyway- and flying in would only get you noticed and mean you have to fight off an entire army at once... what do you do? Why, take the still-under-construction tunnel, of course!

In Harry Potter and the Chalice of the Moon the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, due to a centaur prophecy that death would take place on that day, was faced with either killing Harry's twin brother Mark or letting him kill her with the Sword of Gryffindor, costing Harry a mentor figure and important ally. At the last second she decided to knock Mark out and kill the only one for whom death wouldn't be permanent - Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes.

In the ''Gensokyo 20XX series, earlier we have it where Ran, Chen, and Flandre encounter a starving Reimu. At first, Ran has the notion to take Reimu to a hospital but acknowledges that cannot really be done without either Reimu dying en route from the cold, as a hospital is a long ways off from where they were, or having a risk of being captured for being youkai, something that could lead to their demises, so Ran decides to eliminate both possibilities by placing her under a hibernation spell (Think Sleeping Beauty) that wasn't to be broken until Yukari returns.

Sight has Ichigo's hollow try and fight for control. If Ichigo loses, the hollow takes over his body and if he wins, the hollow doesn't try anything for awhile. To everyone's surprise, Ichigo vehemently refuses to fight at all, which results in a forced truce where the hollow can't fight him, but still hangs around. It's also lampshaded.

"Where do ya get off choosin' a third option?"

Game Theory

A classic from Mathematics: the Truel, a duel with three participants. Mr. White has a one in three chance of hitting his target, Mr. Grey a two in three chance, and Mr. Black is a perfect shot. To make things fair, Mr. White has the first shot. Who should he shoot?

If he shoots at Mr. Grey, he might kill him, then Mr. Black has the next shot. Oops.

If he shoots at Mr. Black, seemingly the better option, he might kill him, then Mr. Grey has the next shot. Oh dear.note Mr. White has a 1-in-7 chance of survival here.

If he takes a third option and shoots into the air, Mr. Grey and Mr. Black shoot at each other until one dies (each would consider the other the greater threat), then Mr. White has the first shot in a duel.note Odds of Mr. White's survival here is 39.7%.

In the story of "Alices Restaurant", Arlo Guthrie, upon being summoned to the police station over a matter of a pile of trash, surmises that the police officer will either commend Arlo and his friends for their honesty (which even Arlo says is highly improbable) or verbally chew them out. Instead of either of those possibilities, they get arrested.

... but when we got to the police officer station, it turned out there was a third possibility...

Occurs in the story of "The Choice", by Ben Weiner. Or, parodied, rather. The two options are soup or salad, and the third option, eventually suggested by the impatient waiter, is soup and salad.

In the song Gay or European from Legally Blonde: The Musical, everyone is debating whether or not Mikos is gay or European. As it turns out, he's gay and European.

"You could go with this, or you could go with that... or you could go with us."

Said lyric is taken from "The Choice Is Yours" by Black Sheep.

In "Luigi's Ballad" by Music/Starbomb, Princess Peach is presented with choosing between the somewhat-risque Mario, or the more emotional Luigi. She ends up chosing Toad, because "his whole body is shaped like a dick", to which both Mario and Luigi concur.

Mythology & Religion

Taking the Third Option is one of the central, if not even the single most important principle of Buddhism. Born as a prince and having lived all his life in a palace, Siddhartha Gautama lost all joy in the riches and pleasures of his life when he realized that all people will eventually become old, sick, and die. So he became a wandering ascetic, hoping to find spiritual happiness by ignoring everything material and only meditating all the time. But even though he tried harder than anyone else, it only made him starve and become sick, so he gave it up as well and started to eat again and take care of his health. Only when he tried to find a balance between comfort and living a simple life did he gain enightenment and became the Buddha. Teaching this Middle Way to the other ascetics that he was living with is regarded as the birth of the Buddhist community.

Similar story to the previous: Some time ago, a prince offered those who had committed a crime a chance to either die by being hanged or being decapitated with a sword (which was considered honorable), which consisted in saying something true, non-related to the prince. Most people failed due to the prince, who just declined everything said and condemned them to die by the mob. One day, an old man was being judged, after being asked the question, he said "I'll be hanged". If he got hanged, then what he said would be a truth, so he should be decapitated. But then if he was decapitated, he would have been saying a lie. The prince was impressed by such a demonstration of wit, and let the old man live.

When Kuchisake-onna asks you if you think she's pretty, especially after she reveals her Glasgow Grin, honesty is just plain suicidal. Telling her she DOES look pretty isn't a good idea either (as "kirei", the word she uses for "pretty", also means "to cut with a knife", and she is apparently powered by bad puns). However, you can...

There's an old story about a princess that was forced by an evil witch to marry one of her ugly sons, so they will become king. The princess must make a statement, and if that statement is true, she will marry son A. If it's false, she'll marry son B. After some deliberation, the princess says "I will marry son B". The evil witch is unable to come up with a solution, and lets the princess go free.

This Logic Bomb appears in other forms. One variant is a condemned being given a choice between two methods of execution depending on the truth of his next statement. The condemned then states he will be subject to the execution for lying.

There's a fairy tale in which a farmer brags about his clever daughter, and the king agrees to marry her if she can solve a riddle; else the farmer has to pay for his bragging. The riddle is that she must come to his palace to meet him neither during the day nor night, neither naked nor clothed, neither hungry nor fed, neither on foot or with a ride, and neither on the road nor off it. The farmer's daughter arrives at dawn/dusk depending on the story, with a fishnet wrapped around her, having drunk her fill of water, being dragged by a horse on the edge of the road. The king marries her.

There's a similar story where, instead of arriving like that, the daughter simply didn't show.

In another version the requirements were neither nude nor clothed, neither riding nor walking, neither day nor night, and she must bring a "gift that is not a gift". She comes at dusk/dawn with a blanket covering her so she was neither clothed nor nude, with one leg over a goat so she was not quite riding yet not quite walking, and in a small cage she had a bird that as she gave it to him she let it go free. On their wedding day the king made her promise not to interfere with his kingly duties, one day she does and her punishment is to be sent back to her father, but as the king still loves her, he allows her to take with her one gift. She chooses to take him. The king decides not to make her leave.

A solution in another version is to come during a solar eclipse, with a blanked wrapped on, having drunk milk, and arriving either by horse-drawn sleigh astride the road edge, or arriving by a boat. The king marries her.

In the story, The King's Equal, a dying king tells his son that he can't take the throne until he marries a woman who he admits is as beautiful, intelligent, and rich as he is. Eventually, a gorgeous young peasant girl shows up, and the prince says that she's "the most beautiful creature [he's] ever seen." She doesn't want anything because she has her friends, while he wants the crown. And she knows something he doesn't -he's very lonely. The prince admits that she's his equal... and the woman announces that, in fact, he has just admitted that she's better than him in every way, and sends him off to care for her goats for a year while she gets the kingdom back in order. He comes back a better person and they get married.

A 14-year-old Lebanese girl named Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar Rayès was stuck between two possible Arranged Marriages. Her stepmother said she should marry her brother (aka the kid's uncle); her maternal aunt, however, said the girl should marry her son. After witnessing the two women fight it out, Rafqa locked herself in her room to pray and think about what she should do... and took the third option she had left: becoming a nun, not just to escape the marriages but because she already wanted to do so. She became the first Lebanese female Catholic saint.

There is a Russian folk story of an old man sentenced to death by Czar. The Czar grants him one wish. The man says: "Give me five years and if I manage to teach a horse to speak, let me free". Some of his friends protest and say he should have gone to death proudly while some say he should have pleaded mercy from Czar. The man replies: "See, I am an old man, and within five years a lot of things may happen. I may die, the horse may die or the Czar may die. And there is always the chance that the horse will learn to speak."

The Pharisees tried several times to try and turn Jesus' popularity against him. In one example, they asked whether the Jews should pay the oppressive taxes imposed on them by their Roman overlords. Answering yes would anger the Jews; answering no would bring down the wrath of the Romans. Jesus pointed to Caesar's face on a coin and advised the listeners to "Give Caesar what is Caesar's and God what is God's." Since both sides at least claimed not to be interested in what was the other's, everyone was happy... No one found anything to complain about.

The Pharisees tried again with a woman caught committing adultery, whom they presented before Jesus. According to Mosaic Law, the penalty for adultery was stoning, so the Pharisees asked Jesus what should be done with her. They had hoped to trap Him into doing something incriminating (note that they only presented the woman; adultery is not a sin that can be committed alone) - say that she should not be stoned would disregard the law of Moses; saying that she should be stoned would incur the wrath of the Romans as they were the only ones with the legal authority to execute someone. Jesus eventually replied to "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", setting the bar so high that no one could stone her. Everyone eventually left but the woman, whom Jesus told to Go and Sin No More.

Two young women who lived in the same house and who both had an infant son came to Solomon for a judgement. One of the women said that the other, after accidentally smothering her own son while sleeping, had exchanged the two children to make it appear that the living child was hers. The other woman denied this and so both women claimed to be the mother of the living son and said that the dead boy belonged to the other. After some thought, King Solomon called for a sword to be given to him. He declared that there is only one fair solution: the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. Upon hearing this terrible verdict, the boy's true mother cried out, "Please, My Lord, give her the live child—do not kill him!" However, the liar, in her bitter jealousy, exclaimed, "It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!" Solomon instantly gave the live baby to the real mother, realizing that the true mother's instincts were to protect her child, whatever the cost, while the liar revealed that she did not truly love the child.

In The Book of Esther, after Aman is executed, the king cannot cancel the order to kill the Jews, since that was a signed and sealed royal order. He also cannot allow the order to be carried out. So he issues an edict allowing Jews to fight back.

Newspaper Comics

Averted in Dilbert when he is visited by Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light. Phil offers him two options as punishment for his sins, one where he will have a meaningless job, but will be paid highly, and one where he will have an important job, but be paid badly. You do not see which he chooses, but Dilbert is delighted, because both are better than his current position (where he is paid badly for meaningless work).

Played for laughs in one Drabble strip. That week, Ralph had been harassed by the new water inspector trying to encourage him to use less water. One day, the inspector admonishes him for using a glass to get some water since it would take two more glasses to clean it. He tells him to use paper cups instead. Norman then points out that using paper cups would mean cutting down more trees to make more cups. Ralph's solution doesn't sit well with his wife.

Honeybunch: For goodness sakes, Ralph! Don't drink right from the faucet!

Radio

Adventures in Odyssey has an episode where Connie becomes the valedictorian. One of the things she has to do on stage however is say a prayer. So the principal of the college and her tutor let her write a prayer, only to find it makes references to Jesus which offends other members of the faculty. So the principal says she should pray the college's "acceptable" prayer. He adds that if she doesn't pray the "acceptable" prayer he'll stop her during her prayer and get her in more trouble. However, her tutor says if she wants to say her own prayer, she (and some other faculty members) will support her. On the day itself Connie makes the decision to...not pray at all!

In Deadlands, Dr. Darius Hellstrome is pretty adept at taking the third option. During the Great Rail Wars, all the good rail routes got taken around the Rocky Mountains, meaning he'd either have to fight one of the other Rail Barons for territory, or commit financial suicide by trying to build track through the Rocky Mountains. Instead, he takes a third option by creating an invention that allows him to dig underneath the Rocky Mountains, which had the added benefit of hiding his progress from his competitors.

He did it again in The Last Sons Plot Point Campaign where he exploited a loophole where the Sioux forbid any outsiders from laying track on their lands. After all, they didn't say anything about laying track under their lands. Surprisingly, nobody suspected that he'd take the same third option he previously took.

Realizing that his life would eventually end in one way or another, Hellstrome could either plan to take all his work with him to the grave or find a successor. Instead, he created an automated process that could indefinitely preserve his mind in the event that he died, thus allowing him to live well into the Hell on Earth era two centuries later.

Averted in the Deadlands: Hell on Earth adventure Unity (which also was the intro to Deadlands: Lost Colony). At the end of the scenario, a mad computer controlling the starship forces the characters to choose one of them to voluntarily sacrifice themsleves, or it will kill everyone on board the ship. The authors of the scenario went to great lengths to assure that there is no third option. The only way to save everyone on board is to do as it commands and have someone sacrifice themselves for The Needs of the Many.

In the Battletech universe, Clan Nova Cat decided to fight on the side of the Second Star League, since to them the entire point of the Clan Invasion was to rebuild the Star League in the first place. This was generally seen as treasonous by the other Clans, which told them in something called a Trial of Abjuration to get out of Clan space or be destroyed. This left them with no particularly good options: they could either effectively refuse the Abjuration, which would get it upgraded to a Trial of Annihilation (which is exactly what it sounds lik]) or they could go to the Inner Sphere and conquer a new homeland, where they would get absolutely destroyed by the Second Star League they had just effectively joined. The Draconis Combine actually offered them a third option in taking over the Irece Prefecture (and thus becoming an effective buffer state against the Clans), but just accepting this would be against Clan honor and Clan Nova Cat would lose all of its face and suffer internal revolt. The Nova Cats came up with a fourth option by goading the Combine into a series of Trials of Absorption that the Nova Cats rigged to lose.

Notable examples include having a wire-thin Aerospace Pilot phenotype arm-wrestling the biggest infantryman the Combine could find and calling "Edge!" on a coin flip.

How this rules-lawyering still managed to be honorable as far as the Clans were concerned can be explained by the explanation given by the Clanner who called the previous coin-flip, IIRC: "What if it had landed on its edge? Think of the glory."

One Pathfinder module has you breaking into a warehouse in Riddle Port in order to question the the guards. after accomplishing this and taking out all of the guards you can then loot the warehouse and find several potions and weapons. Far more than you could ever carry. Upon leaving the warehouse a group of thugs will threaten to kill you if you don't give them what you stole. You can either fight them off or hand over the goods and they will leave you alone. OR you can simply point out to them that they could just rob the currently unguarded warehouse which would take less effort while being more profitable. They're pretty stupid though so it is actually possible to fail the diplomacy check.

The Merchant of Venice: Launcelot has to decide between continuing to work for Shylock, whom he sees as "the devil", or running away...which would be committing a sin, thereby putting him in the service of the real devil. He gets out of the dilemma when his father shows up and helps him to lawfully switch jobs.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is an interesting example. Hermia has to decide between marrying Demetrius or being put to death, with the "third option" of becoming a nun. She takes a fourth option, running off with Lysander to get away from the laws of Athens.

In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice for All, Phoenix at one point must decide whether to save Maya from an assassin while condemning an innocent woman, or convict his guilty client but let Maya die. In the end, he manages to convince the assassin to drop his contract by revealing that the guilty client had planned to betray him all along; he releases Maya and announces his intention to kill the treacherous client next, who is scared for his life to the point that he demands a guilty verdict.

Subverted at the very end, though: after that reveal, you must still either accuse your client of being guilty or defend him to the end, asking for a "not guilty" verdict. The outcome is the same.

There are also multiple points where Phoenix/Apollo/Edgeworth reconcile a contradiction by saying that the contradiction itself is true. The most notable is in the final case of Trials and Tribulations when Iris appears to be in two places at once according to two separate pieces of testimony. Which testimony is true? Both. One of the 'Irises' is her twin sister Dahlia, being channeled by Misty Fey.

Edgeworth gets another one in the sequel. Early on, he is asked whether he wants to uphold the law as a prosecutor or to save people as a defense attorney. By the end of the game, he decides to save people as a prosecutor.

Sakura Oogami from Danganronpa took one. It's eventually revealed at the end of case 4's trial that the reason Monobear was able to persuade Sakura to be The Mole was because Monobear was holding the Oogami dojo hostage. Sakura either had to kill someone and thus lose her moral integrity, which would emotionally destroy her (and cause her to be bloodily executed if she can't get away with it), or lose her family's beloved dojo which is the other important thing in her life... And what does she do? She kills herself, which simultaneously satisfies the dojo-saving requirement of killing someone (her own person) while preserving Sakura's moral integrity by not actually killing any of the others.

The sequel had a dilemma of the same kind. Option A: everyone leaves the islands... including the Mastermind. And no, its escape cannot be impeded if this option is choosed. Option B: stay on the islands as prisoners to keep the Mastermind trapped. Then some help comes and offers option C, which takes the best of A and B as the Mastermind dies and everyone else escapes... but most of them will recover their erased memories. Which aren't pleasant.

After Saber nearly wipes her magical energy empty with the Excalibur, Shirou is initially faced with two options as to how to restore her energy: 1. transfer his energy to her, which is out of the question due to his poor magic skill. 2. Have her kill humans and steal their energy, which he doesn't want to do for obvious reasons. Later, however, Rin reveals that there is a third option: have sex with Saber. Too weak as a magus to transfer magic, and too moral to slaughter the lives of innocents, Shirou hesitatinglytakes option three.

Parodied in the fake 'dead-end', on Fate route, where Shirou tells Saber they will fast. Tiger and Illya turn him into a cyborg with gatling guns, and offer him a chance to 'join the Tigers willingly, or be brainwashed and turn into a machine.' His response? Turn on the gatling guns.

Juniper's Knot: The demon girl is trapped within a magic circle. At least one life form must be inside the circle at all times, so someone has to take her place in order for her to escape from her prison. The boy has to either exchange places with her or leave her to her fate. He chooses to instead plant a tree within the circle, thereby substituting the life of the tree for hers. It works.

To get to the secret Music Test in Radical Dreamers you have to choose an invisible third option at one point in the game.

Webcomics

In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, creator Chris Hastings chose a third option in regards to the question of whether or not to include shading in the strips. He hired a colorist.

In Ansem Retort, Xemnas asks Axel how he plans on stopping Xemnas and saving Sora at the same time? Axel's response? He's fine with one of two and kills Sora himself.

Parodied in a guest strip for Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures , which presents a standard Good Angel, Bad Angel scenario regarding the purchase of an expensive colored pencil set with money earned from donations. By the time it's over, however, both sides agree on her alternative solution: "LARCENY WAS NOT THE ANSWER!"

Near the end of the "Snowsong" arc of Dominic Deegan, Oracle For Hire, Snowsong turns herself into ice and orders Gregory (to whom she's frozen herself) to make a choice - save her life via magic and give her ice golem time to destroy the city of Barthis, or smash her to pieces and kill her so he can stop the golem. Gregory merely smiles, removes the spells on himself (which turns her back to normal) and uses another set of spells to turn them into a kinetic force powerful enough to shatter the golem on impact.

Sil'lice of Drowtales and her badly wounded and exhausted army were given two options by their enemies, live by surrendering, or die fighting. Sil'lice's gaze goes over her bloody and exhausted army and she makes the decision of live... By fighting and leads her army into battle. They defeat the enemy, but almost their entire force is killed off and they completely lose the war in the end.

In Erfworld, Vinny Doombats suggests two options for escaping an enemy trap, after warning Ansom that "You won't like 'em." because they leave the enemy with a free hand to finish off Ansom's siege train. Ansom chooses the third option of taking his chances with the trap and ordering a hunt for the enemy's raiding force.

This is Parson's MO. Faced with the decision between fighting a losing battle and surrendering the stronghold? Parson orders his remaining casters to cast Animate Dead... on the volcano the stronghold is sitting on, blowing away the stronghold and the enemy. Parson later wonders if the titular RPG Mechanics Verse is designed to promote outside-the-box thinking.

Parson mentions that this was the entire point of the table-top campaign he was running when he got summoned: he was putting his players into a situation unwinnable by conventional means just to see if they'd come up with something else. He's clearly a big fan of this trope. When he's first presented with the hopeless tactical situation he asks himself "What Would Ender Do?"

In 510, Sam and Helix give two options about where to fly their ship. Florence says, "Actually, we need to go the spaceport." Sam wasn't expecting this third option.

In 1803, Florence has to decide whether to help Sam or the police. Florence flips a coin, but Sam unexpectedly snatches the coin, so it doesn't land heads or tails. This induces Florence to take a third option, "Prepare the ship for the mission."

Homestuck: The newly-revived Aradia is holding Bec Noir in place with her time powers. However, she can't hold him there forever, giving her the choice of releasing him and dying now or holding him in place and dying when she eventually runs out of power. Her solution? Release him, then use his own space-bending powers against him to run straight to his power source and the dream bubbles of her friends.

Typheus teaches John how to do this by drowning John in oil. John can't turn into wind in order to escape and using his new Reality Warper powers to teleport away would prove pointless to his objectives. So, he decides to teleport all of the oil (All of it) across the entire narrative up to that point instead. Thus, John comes one step closer to both learning to control his powers and completing his personal quest.

Gary manages to take one on a very important decision, accidentally. The "sex contest" between Sonya and Yuki is over who will become his girlfriend, and hence, though they don't know it, will decide who gets to take his virginity. It ends in disaster, and Gary and Yuki's semi-professional therapist Kiley have to try and clear up the mess. Gary then ends up having sex with Kiley.

Later, in Paris, Senna and Sandra fall into an argument over which one of them Gary should spend time with, and whether this should involve "high culture" or "geek culture". Gary's third option involves all of them taking a trip to Brussels. It Makes Sense in Context.

"Vengeful" in morphE is given the choice of either fighting a young child to the death or both her and the kid being killed for refusing to fight. Her choice is to give the kid a shard of broken tile and order him to kill her so that he can live. Also serves as a character defining moment, as she recovers from being killed.

The PCs try in #428 to determine which one of three identical-looking skeletons is the real Big Bad, and which are the decoys. They have only one shot at guessing. The answer is: they're all decoys. The fourth (and real) one is currently invisible and flying right next to them on his zombie dragon.

More stereotypically, in #327 they are confronted with two guardians: one always lies; the other always tells the truth. They both have said which is the "correct" path. The party is about to begin trying to ascertain whom to believe when Haley shoots one. The guards' instinctive reactions to this show who's telling the truth and who isn't.

The pacifist Celia is held captive by the Greysky City Thieves' Guild, and Roy is encouraging her to fight back, as in a D&D-esque world, it's kill or be killed. She opts for legal negotiation instead.

When a Huecuva and a ninja assassin start fighting over which one of them will kill Hinjo, he suggests a compromise called 'giant dwarf with a hammer.'

Thog pulled two in two strips. A fight broke out and Thog was unarmed, till he kicked the door in half and wielded it. The next strip, Thog did not want to hurt Elan (after the two had become "friends" and broke out of prison) so Thog just started to smash Haley instead.

Tailsteak's website has a series of comics called "TQ" (short for "tertium quid", "third option" in Latin) in which the titular character steps into a debate between a hippie and a rich businessman to tell them they're both wrong about such-and-such an issue, to the annoyance of both.

A later comic shows a heated argument about whether there should be one or two spaces between sentences. Then someone suggests a linebreak after every sentence.

In Tower of God, the Ranker Quant is at one point put in a bind by his examinees, being told to either hand over the badge of the It or let the hostages, other examinees, die. He tells that they can try and draw blood, but the moment they do, everybody will die. By his hands.

Web Original

Fatebane frequently chooses a bizarre out-of-box-thinking way of getting out of seemingly impossible situations in Associated Space, to the extent that his companion lampshades this tendency:

"What?" David looked doubtful. "There's a third option? Crazy and daring?"

Uncyclopedia insists that in a dilemma of two options, there is always a third option... cake.

Always delicious. Never complicated. Just cake.

Accomplished by Jesse Cox of OMFGcata during a Let's Play of the DLC of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Rather than give in to a Sadistic Choice of rescuing a crucial witness or several innocents, he successfully reasons out where the poison gas threatening them is and destroys it instead.

In a review of Star Trek: Voyager Neelix offers the advice that when facing a crossroads, sometimes you should take the third path. Chuck points out that following this metaphor, the third path would be back the way you came.

Toho Kingdom Toons has one in one of their earlier cartoons, where Gabara offers Little Godzilla a potion that could kill him. You have the option of saying "YES" OR "NO", but regardless of which choice you pick you ultimately get the 3rd option of "He should resist this peddler of peculiar potions @ all costs!"

In Noob, Gaea ended up taking an option that turned out to be just as bad, if not worse than the other offered to her: pays her new guild's debts out of her own pocket despite being The Scrooge as Guild Master responsibility, have her incompetent guildmates come up with the money ot be thrown in jail. She choose leaving the guild so she's no longer Guild Master, only to have her debtor reply "You know this keeps you from joining any of our faction's guilds until you pay up, right ?".

Discussed in Star Wars in 3-D!!!. Matt mentions iTunes as a third option to Blockbuster and Netflix.

In Psychic Octopus & Oil Spills, Matt takes a third option between calling the octopus an octopus and calling the octopus an octopi:

Matt: This octopus - is it "octopus", or "octopi"? [Beat] This octo is named Paul, and he was born in England, but he lives in Germany.

A Giant Sucking Sound: The premise of the story is Ross Perot winning the 1992 election. Unfortunately, he has trouble getting much of his agenda threw Congress, so he forms the populist Freedom Party, made mostly of moderate Republicans, conservative Democrats, mavericks, political fringes, and forever dismantles the two party system.

Video game reviewer Caddicarus has a system where he "slaughters" a bad game by shooting it, or "salvages" it by beaming it up with a transporter. In his review of Destruction Derby 2, he declares that the game isn't quite bad enough to slaughter since he got some enjoyment out of it, but not quite good enough to salvage. He instead opts to "slauvage" it by beaming it up halfway, then shooting it. A few games since have gotten the "slauvage" too.

Miscellaneous

The glass with water in half of it. Half full, or half empty? A joke says that an engineer will answer, "The glass is twice as large as it needs to be."

Played with in a classic "Far Side" Cartoon. The first two people say "half empty" and "half full" respectively, a third goes back and forth between the two before forgetting the question, while a fourth looks at the glass and goes, "HEY! I ordered a cheeseburger!"

"The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks."

The surrealist says the glass is a giraffe wearing a necktie

The optimist says, the glass is half-full. The pessimist says the glass is half-empty. The realist says "Yep. That sure is a glass alright." The idealist says one day, cold fusion from the glass will provide unlimited energy and end wars. The capitalist says If he bottle the glass and gives it a New Age-y name, he can make a fortune. The communist says the glass belongs to everyone in equal measure. The sexist says the glass isn't going to fill itself, honey-bun. The nihilist says the glass does not exist and neither does he. The opportunist says he knows there's a T-shirt in here somewhere. (This is a famous T-shirt).

The liar says the glass is all the way full.

In an EddieIzzard routine people is asked if they would like "Cake or death?" Everyone responds "Cake" and eventually the cake runs out. To which the next person replies "So my choices are... or death?? I'll take the chicken."

Real Life

In the 1920s, a British submarine captain in China once faced the Hobson's Choice of either allowing a hijacked river steamer to escape, or allowing the pirates to kill their hostages. He took the third option of sinking the ship. He fired a shot into the waterline, causing the ship to settle slowly, so that the passengers and crew could easily abandon ship, and in the confusion most of the pirates were killed. Since they had blended with the passengers, it was uncertain how many pirates had escaped and how many innocents had died, but the overall solution worked, and the captain was exonerated.

Something similar happened in the English debates leading up to the Canadian parliamentary election in 2006. While future Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper tore then-PM Paul Martin's corrupt Liberal government to shreds, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Jack Layton, took most of his time to remind Canadians that they "always have a third option," and to vote NDP. It backfired spectacularly, making Layton look like a kid in the back of a classroom, jumping up and down and yelling "pick me!" The media backlash was so large, and the third-option catchphrase repeated so often to tarnish Layton's reputation, that it's the closest thing to Memetic Mutation in the political journalism field.

Jack Layton tried it again in the 2011 election, and was mostly successful. And then he died.

In the run-up to the 2010 UK General Elections, Nick Clegg repeatedly stressing his own existence went down very well, creating a positive Memetic Mutation called 'Cleggmania'. Despite leading the polls at one point, the Liberal Democrats actually lost seats in the election, despite gaining votes. They did managed to enter a coalition government, which was more likely to be what they were hoping for at the start. Their popularity has since declined due to the fact that many of their supporters have felt betrayed by their decision to join a Conservative-led government, especially after breaking a promise to not raise tuition fees on universities.

Irish commentators have usually labelled the Irish political system as a two and a half party system. The Labour Party is the 'half' party; much like the Liberal Democrats in Britain, they are much bigger than smaller parties in the Dáil (Irish Parliament) but smaller than the other two dominant parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil). Historically, when Fianna Fáil lost elections, Labour would form a coalition with Fine Gael (and once in the early 90's they were in coalition with FF). This seems to have changed in 2011 where Labour gained more seats than Fianna Fáil to become the second largest party, but their involvement in the present FG/Lab Government might undo this advance.

Costa Rica's two-party system was broken when PLN centre-left party and PUSC centre-right party face the new and popular PAC (center). PAC won the presidential election in 2014.

In the United States presidential election of 1912, the Republican nominee was incumbent William Howard Taft and the Democratic nominee was Woodrow Wilson. But Taft had a falling out with his mentor and predecessor as president, Theodore Roosevelt, leading TR to give voters a third option: himself. He created his own Progressive Party, soon to be better known as the Bull Moose Party. Taft ended up as the only incumbent president and the only Republican Party nominee for president to ever finish in third place, carrying just two states and winning 8 electoral votes. However, TR's six states and 88 electoral votes still left him in a distant second to Wilson.

Post-1912, third parties in the United States have never really had very much success in federal elections, compared to other western countries. There have, however, been a few notable exceptions:

Senator Strom Thurmond carried four of the Deep South states (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina) for the Dixiecrat Party in the 1948 presidential election.

Senator Harry F. Byrd ran as an independent in the 1960 presidential election and took Mississippi, as well as half of Alabama and an electoral vote in Oklahoma.

Governor and famous segregationist George Wallace ran as a Dixiecrat (not the same as Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, but rather a breakaway faction of the Democratic Party that was formally named the "States' Rights Democratic Party", with "states' rights" in this context being a euphemism for racial segregation) in the 1968 presidential election and carried five Deep South states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi). He is notable for being the last third party candidate to carry any state.

Libertarian Party candidate John Hospers won a single electoral vote from Virginia in the 1972 presidential election. This is impressive since Hospers was only on the ballot in two states (Colorado and Washington) and received the lowest number of votes of any candidate during that election (to put it in perspective, beyond the two major parties he was beaten out by a far-right conspiracy theorist, the Communist Party candidate, a pediatrician, three different socialist candidates and even the Prohibition Party candidate).

Ronald Reagan won a single electoral vote from the state of Washington in the 1976 presidential election. Although he had lost the Republican nomination that year, his rivalry in the primaries with nominee Gerald Ford kick started his rise in popularity, and allowed him to win the nomination (and ultimately the presidential election) in 1980.

Congressman John B. Anderson ran as an independent in the 1980 presidential election after losing the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan. Although he didn't carry any states, he ended up doing surprisingly well in the popular vote.

Although the 1988 election was a pretty solid victory for Republican George H.W. Bush with no real surprises, one elector from West Virginia did end up casting her vote for Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis' running mate, Lloyd Bentsen. Nobody knows why she did it, though many Democrats at the time did feel that he was a stronger candidate than Dukakis and perhaps deserved some sort of recognition (similar to the above-mentioned vote for Reagan in the 1976 election). Or maybe she was just that impressed with his "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" line in the VP debate with Dan Quayle.

Billionaire Ross Perot ran two very famous (and ultimately ill-fated) presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996. Like Anderson he didn't carry any states, but he did win a whopping 18% of the popular vote in 1992 (by far the highest percentage of any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt's 27% eighty years earlier), as well as an impressive-but-less-whopping 8% in 1996, though this was largely due to his dropping out of the race, then re-entering, then dropping out before finally re-entering completely.

Most recently (as well as most controversially) was the run of political activist Ralph Nader as the Green Party candidate in the 2000 presidential election. Although he did not gain a very large percentage of the vote, he was perceived as "taking away" votes from the Democratic nominee Al Gore, splitting the ticket in key states and allowing Republican nominee George W. Bush to win the election. Now the claim would be laughable in any other year, but the 2000 election was so close that some analysts back then actually took it seriously as a deciding factor (well, as one of the many (often strange) factors, anyway).

In the days right before the Roman Civil War, Pompey and the Senate attempted to foist two lose-lose options onto Gaius Julius Caesar: return to Rome without his veteran legions in Gaul and be crucified in court, or refuse to return, which would lead to him being declared an enemy of the state. With Caesar's legions spread across Gaul and the war season rapidly drawing to a close, by the time he could gather all his forces he would have found an overwhelming army prepared against him. Caesar, proving once again that he deserved his reputation for military genius, decided to Take a Third Option. He realized that the one legion he had on hand was more than the zero legions his enemies had mustered so far, and marched one legion into Italy proper. They conquered Rome without a fight and Caesar held the initiative for a good part of the war after that.

In general, politicians in a two party system find success in appealing to the moderates as having found a "Third Way." Bill Clinton was known for such positions. Clinton's political team referred to the strategy as "triangulation"— using both conservatives in Congress and his own party's left wing as foils for his own policies. This lead to him being branded him as a "waffler" early in his term by opponents, and as a "sell-out" after he left office by liberals. Among many on the left, "triangulation" came to be a term of derision, with the suggestion that rather than using the left and right as "foils" it actually reflected a lack of conviction and a mere pandering to whatever polled well at the moment. However, it also earned him accolades in opinion polls from the general public both at the time and to this day.

This inspired the concept of "Compassionate Conservatism" used by his successor, George W. Bush. It has been argued that both politicos were echoing the first President Bush, who attempted to distance himself from his wildly popular predecessor by calling for a "kinder, gentler nation" than that of Ronald Reagan.

In his book What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank argued (incorrectly) that this triangulation strategy would doom the Democratic party, since it would render the Democrats indistinguishable from the Republicans except on sociocultural issues, guaranteeing that they would lose the white working-class vote and be even more vulnerable to accusations of being anti-American and/or anti-Christian than they were before.

The political opponents of Tony Blair, one of the politicians to rely on such rhetoric, remarked at the time that he was not the first politician to claim he had found a Third Way between free markets and state control... the slogan "Third Way" was initially used by Benito Mussolini.

The Berlin Airlift. After the Soviets blockaded the western-controlled West Berlin, an enclave in East Germany, the only apparent options for supplying the city were to try and force their way past the Soviet blockade, thus giving the USSR grounds to retaliate and potentially start WW III, or to allow the city to be starved into submission. Instead the Western Allies choose to fly in the supplies required by the city's two million plus population. The largest airlift in history followed and it placed the shoe completely on the other foot; the airlift could only be stopped if the Soviets started downing planes.

Not that they didn't try as the planes flew in for a landing....

Fort Sumter. The Union could either send a ship to resupply it, and give the Confederacy an excuse saying they were being attacked to start a war while blaming the Union, or let them all starve. The Union instead choose to warn everyone faaaar in advance that a ship would be sent without weapons solely to resupply the fort, giving the 'blame' for starting the war to the South.

In the early days of the Space Race, the scientists involved were divided into two camps as to how to get to the Moon: the first, NASA's "Direct Ascent" concept, would build an unbelievably huge rocket capable of launching from the ground, flying to the Moon, landing, lifting off from the Moon, and returning to Earth. Dr. von Braun proposed an alternative Earth Orbit Rendezvous, wherein multiple launches would construct and fuel a vehicle with a similar flight profile in Earth orbit. In 1961, a working group was assembled to hash out which option NASA would commit to. Instead, the conference resulted in a third option: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. By using a small vehicle to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface and back, they avoided the massive cost of landing and lifting the fuel and equipment for the homeward journey.

This option was not initially considered because no spacecraft rendezvous had ever been accomplished before; it was considered risky even in Earth orbit, where astronauts could de-orbit in an emergency. The risk of the lander docking with the command module after the surface mission was considered great, but the engineering challenges in building the LOR launch vehicle were relatively minor in comparison. Practicing orbital rendezvous was the whole point of the Gemini program.

This applies to many minor political parties.

The Non-Aligned Movement. Countries like India, Malaysia, Egypt, Tito's Yugoslavia, Indonesia and others chose to join neither the USSR nor USA in the Cold War, making their own alliance instead. This is exactly what "Third World countries" originally meant.

Some gamers complain about draconian DRM, since they can only either buy the game, which they would have to deal with said DRM (some of which has been construed as malicious), or not buy the game which may lead to their non-support for the DRM being misinterpreted as non-support for the game. Instead they Take a Third Option of buying the game and then getting a crack or some other method of playing the game without the DRM (see Spore).

Running a pirated version also runs the risk of having another form of potentially nastier unwanted software on the computer: malware. Those pirates aren't internet crusaders on your side against the evils of DRM. They're just that, pirates. However, it's usually not the game itself made into malware, but the "keygen" program or crack that is.

It is worth noting that the behavior of some DRM is almost identical to the behavior of malware (e.g. StarForce) and could be used by a less than honest employee of whatever company produced the DRM to serve up worse forms of malware. Some DRM platforms are just outright security hazards, like earlier versions of Ubisoft's UPlay.

Or take a fifth option and stick to playing open-source games (see also below), though that's no good if you want to play the big commercial titles.

The unfortunate thing is that lack of sales, due to disinterest or piracy, is a Morton's Fork for gamers and fans of the product. Some companies will interpret weak sales as people just pirating the game, either killing the series or justifying the "need" for draconian DRM. It doesn't help that it's solely up to the publisher what "lack of sales" means.

The False Dichotomyfallacy is all about this - a problem is presented as having two solutions, when there might be more.

The Golden Mean Fallacy is the inverse...wherein the "third option" is not always the best option, and can actually be the worst.

Weekday Vegetarianism. From the talk: "I realised that what I was being pitched was a binary solution [...] so I wondered... might there be a third solution?"

When Anthrocon was debating whether or not a move from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh would affect whether or not people would attend, the majority of those polled Took a Third Option: they didn't care which city it was in because they lived so far away that the move wouldn't really affect travel.

Psychologist Paul Watzlawick gives us a nice example with the Austrian Franzl Wokurka. He did this the first time when he saw a flower bed with a sign forbidding to rip out flowers; conflicted between obeying a law (he didn't like) and crossing it (which might've lead to consequences) he suddenly had an epiphany, thinking "those flowers are pretty nice" and deciding he wouldn't rip them off because he wanted it so. From then on, he lived his life following this philosophy; thus, he became neither a theist nor an atheist, but an agnosticist. Later, he had his Moment Of Awesome, when Those Wacky Nazis flooded Austria with posters stating "National Socialism or Bolshevist Chaos?", which he would comment with "Erdäpfel oder Kartoffeln?" (spuds or potatos?).

A man tells a TV reporter a story about his grandfather and how he refused to be mistreated despite being a negro in the U.S. deep south back in the 1950s. His grandfather wanted to build a house, and purchased the lumber. The (white) owner of the lumber yard later informs him that he's not going to give him the lumber. So the man wants his money back. Lumber yard owner points out (correctly) that he can get away with not paying him, because even if he sued him, no jury (which would be all-white, in the southern U.S.) would find for a negro. So he's going to keep the money and the lumber. The man then gets angry about it and says that he's taking a third option: either the lumber yard owner refund him his money, give him the lumber he paid for, or he'd kill him. The lumber yard owner then decided that it would be a good idea not to cheat the man, and gave him the lumber he paid for.

Robert Bloch said that, on graduating from high school, he was faced with a choice between working and starving to death. He decided to become a writer, and doboth.

During the late 80s and 90s, computer users were stuck with the choice of the Mac (easy to use, but more expensive with proprietary ports and an unusual software architecture) or IBM-PC (less proprietary, more manufacturers, annoyingly primitive hardware until the introduction of the PCI bus). Some denied the battle and just bought an Amiga (the first multimedia system; way ahead of its time, but owned by a company with poor management). Those with deep enough pockets (or who worked in universities and research labs) bought Unix workstations, which offered a similar combination of graphics and power.

In the late 2000s (decade), a similar event happened following the release of Windows Vista. Widely abhorred, many chose to either stick with Windows XP or switch over to Macs. Some didn't like either and went with Linux OSs (particularly Ubuntu).

A situation that is now being echoed with the release of Windows 8 and its radical change in user interface. Sentiment towards Windows 8 appears more divided than ever. Worse for Microsoft, there are now plenty of third options available, including standing pat (as PC computing power needs have plateaued lately), switching to Linux distributions that are becoming better at handling diverse workloads and handling Windows applications, or abandoning the PC for a portable device (phone or tablet), an option now (thanks to improved computing power on the portable front) much more viable to the consuming public.

In the UK and a few other countries, the Acorn Archimedes was another potential option that was arguably ahead of its time.

A man is in the hospital, due to not feeling well, with his girlfriend. His girlfriend gets a phone call. It's the man's wife, who managed to find his girlfriend's number. The girlfriend asks why the woman on her phone is claiming to be the man's wife. The man responds by losing all color, and collapsing due to cardiac arrest.

One of the ideas from Aristotle's philosophy is that every virtue can be represented as the sensible option when presented with two extremes. For example, 'Wittyness' is presented as the virtue of saying just the right amount in a conversation, between the extremes of saying too little and coming across as shy, or saying too much and being thought of as a bore.

Immanuel Kant, the last Enlightenment philosopher, advocated the "categorical imperative" which, boiled down, meant that an act could be considered "moral" only if it would be reasonable for everyone to act the same way. French philosopher Benjamin Constant pointed out that under this system telling the truth was an imperative (since a society of habitual liars could not function), and a moral person would be forced to tell an inquiring murderer the location of his target. Kant responded in his next essay, pointing out that although it's still wrong to lie to the murderer, that doesn't mean you have to give him the information he wants, either. The system still has critics, but Kant definitely advocated the Third Option to seemingly unwinnable situations.

More moderate/liberal Christian organizations and some churches often market themselves as such, as a third option for those who are not atheist or non-religious but also aren't very conservative or fundamentalist. Emergent churches often do this too as a third option for those unhappy and bored with traditional worship styles between that and not attending. Sometimes it's as simple as performing a Hand Wave: almost all Christian churches oppose abortion, but they will try to woo pro-choice advocates by acting as if anti-abortionism isn't as important to them as other causes that pro-choice people would find more palatable (the Catholic Church having used this strategy semi-successfully).

The celebrated US Supreme Court case of Marbury v Madison. Short version: the Supreme Court was asked to order the Jefferson administration to deliver a letter naming Marbury as a Justice of the Peace, a letter that had been signed under the previous Adams administration with the intention of causing trouble for Jefferson's incoming government. If the Court refused to back Marbury, it'd seem like it was caving in to political pressure; if they did order delivery of the letter and the Jefferson adminstration responded 'make me', it'd expose the fact that the Court had no ability to compel enforcement of its decisions. Instead, the Chief Justice took a third option, stating that Marbury had a right to his commission but that the Court couldn't constitutionally order the administration around in this way:note Specifically: The previous Congress had passed a statute allowing someone to file certain kinds of lawsuits directly in the Supreme Court, and that is what Marbury did. The Supreme Court decided that Congress did not have the power to give the Supreme Court the power to hear that kind of suit directly; if Marbury wanted his commission, he would have to sue in a lower court, and then if he lost there, then he could appeal to the Supreme Court. placating both sides, and not incidentally establishing the principle that the Court gets to decide what's constitutional and what's not. Only later in life would Jefferson, who opposed the idea that the Court should have exclusive say on this matter, realize how badly he'd been hornswoggled.

The "Two-State Solution" to the Arab-Israeli Conflict is intended to be this, with both Israel and the Palestinians having their own independent states.

An actual, but lesser known, third option is the "three-state solution" (this involves giving Jordan control of the West Bank and Egypt on Gaza).

A second third option is the "one-state solution" which involves rolling present-day Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza into one nation. Much like the Two-State and Three-State solutions, few people are holding their breath.

The English (later British) constitutional set-up of 1689 was this. England (which had been plagued by political instability) had the problem of trying to balance monarchism (which they believed could lead to tyranny) with Parliamentary rule (a form of republicanism which they had tried and believed lead to instability). The solution was a "third way": retaining the monarchy but curtailing the king's powers whilst ensuring that, legally, all power was still derived from the crown even though it was largely (and later entirely) executed by Parliament. Not only did this system work but they believed they had found the perfect system of government. When the American colonies decided to try the republican option again many British observers believed it was doomed to failure as it would "only work with small city states".

In regarding to union issues (particularly the ones in California relating to the entertainment industry), the general rule of thumb is that union members are strictly limited to union work and vice versa for non-union members. Then there is something called the "financial core" option (or "fi-core" for short). It let's the said workers work in both union and non-union environments. In regards to working in a union shop and obtaining the benefits of working in the union, the financial core worker must pay a small union fee. They cannot represent or participate in union activities; but at the same time, the financial core member is not restricted the union bylaws (particularly SAG's "Global Rule Number One"), can work in non-union environments, and continue working if the unions go on a strike. Oh yeah, and mentioning this to SAG and AFTRA is a very bad idea.

Fluorescent light bulb note More expensive and contain toxins, but longer lasting and more efficient versus regular incandescent note cheap, but short lived and inefficient. Third option: LED bulbs. note They last over 40 times longer, and use one TENTH the power of incandescent bulbs. They do cost more, but it more than evens out overtime

The origin behind the Eduard "Mr. Trololo" Khil's famous Trololo song. The song he "sings" was actually a famous Russian folk song named “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home”, which had been banned in the USSR due to its lyrics... so when faced with the choice of dropping it from his performances or not, Eduard Khil still sang it, but changed the lyrics to unreadable gibberish. And he got away with it.

The 2012 US Supreme Court case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (aka "the Obamacare case") was decided this way, as the court's four liberal judges voted to uphold the law while three conservative judges and one moderate judge voted to strike it down, leaving conservative Chief Justice John Roberts as the tie breaker. Roberts could either strike down all of the Obamacare law (thus ending health care coverage for millions of people with pre-existing conditions), or violate his conservative philosophy and uphold the law by ruling that the mandate in it is constitutional under the Commerce Clause. Roberts ended up ruling that the mandate was not justifiable under the Commerce Clause, but the penalties for violating it could be considered constitutional as a tax, thus upholding the law.

There is yet another option: It is standard practice for a bill to be edited after the two houses of Congress pass it - usually, these edits are not controversial, and do not change the meaning of either version. The purpose is just to ensure that there is only one version presented for passage. Some opponents claim that the edits to the ADA go beyond this practice and actually change the meaning of one or both of the two versions passed by the two houses. If the law's opponent's had felt that this claim was compelling enough and adopted it as one of their arguments for striking down the law, the Court could have sent it back to Congress for re-passage.

Molly Ivins, writing in Spring 1993, about articles focusing on the first 100 days of Bill Clinton's first presidential term:

Biographies of Saint Alphonsus Maria of Liguori mention him taking one of these. As a former artist who later took the path of priesthood, Alphonsus a big fan of musical performances, but in the times he lived in these were often accompained by acting, which wasn't seen as very "proper" back then. So Alphonsus quietly sat back in a dark corner of the theater... and since he was pretty shortsighted, he could listen perfectly to the music without catching sight of anything "improper" happening on stage.

Various political theories, such as social democracy, and the Third Way are attempts to combine socialism with capitalism. Nearly all world economies are in fact "mixed economies," combining both elements of the free market with central planning. On the other hand, proponents of fascism also saw their ideology as a fusion of socialism and capitalism.

National Bolshevism. A fusion of Communism and Fascism. I wish i was kidding but these kind people do in fact exist.

In research people actively search for this to avert it before a study, because the discovery of a third variable screws up the whole study (it's great science, but not when you have a deadline you have to meet). It's called the confounding variable. For an exaggerated example: the number of drownings correlates with ice cream sales every single year. The higher ice cream sales are, the more people who suffer drowning deaths. You could argue until you are blue in the face about which causes which, but the confounding variable is the simple fact that both occur during summer.

This post which has became a famous meme in the thedailywtf.com community. True, False, or FileNotFound.

In 1978, George Romero was preparing to release Dawn of the Dead and had it submitted to the MPAA for rating. He was told that the violence of the film merited an "X" rating. The problem was that by that time, the untrademarked "X" rating had been co-opted by the porn industry (the original intent was for a self-applicable rating for films that were of adult content, such as Midnight Cowboy, but not porn), making an "X"-rated film a financial disaster as most (legitimate) theaters had stopped allowing "X"-rated movies. He did not want to cut his movie down to an "R" rating, and so took a third option of placing the following disclaimer on all posters and ads:

"There is no explicit sex in this picture. However there are scenes of violence which may be considered shocking. No one under 17 will be admitted."

The London Underground buildings of the British architect Charles Holden. Neither classicist nor modernist, they have an elegant sensitivity to them, and yet they fit into neither camp. He himself said of his architecture that he was "not enough of a traditionalist to please the traditionalists and not enough of a modernist to please the modernists".

The Wii, and to a smaller extent the DS, is Nintendo's third option. Following the relative failure of the GameCube* The Gamecube was profitable, but far, far below expectations, Nintendo was faced with either continuing the graphics arms race with Sony and Microsoft and continuing to struggle against its "kiddy" image, or reorganizing as a third-party developer and continuing to struggle against its "kiddy" image. Nintendo decided to ignore all that, embrace its family friendly nature, and try to redefine a video game market that had been "stable" for decades. And it worked because it became the definitive party game: when Sony and Microsoft started concentrating on online play in earnest, the Wii focused instead on excellent in-person multiplayer gaming, and won over parents, kids, the elderly...target groups that Sony and Microsoft did not consider.

Considering the respective sales figures, the Wii essentially was the 'first option for its console generation. Add in PC game sales, and the Xbox and PlayStation were both the 3rd options.

While flying a 737 towards New Orleans, you lose both engines over the Louisiana swamps. Choices are: try ditching onto a canal or land somewhere on the muddy banks, hoping the 737 would withstand the impact and sudden stop in the soft ground. Or - take a third option and land on top of a levee, half the width of a standard runway and way shorter, but at least even.Bonus points: the captain had only one eye, which leads people whose knowledge has not progressed beyond what they were told at school to erroneously assume that he couldn't properly estimate the distance in the pouring rain; in fact binocular vision, as well as being only one of many mechanisms for extracting depth information from the visual field, is only effective at short range (a few metres) and is entirely irrelevant in terms of the distances involved in landing a plane.

A king learns that his son has committed some misdeed. In his anger, he proclaims that a big stone shall be thrown on his son - he's talking about a stone big enough to kill. When he regains his calm, he notes the dilemma: If he cancels the punishment, he broke his word - but if he pulls it through, his son may die or be crippled at least. One (truly) wise man shows him the third option: Break up the big stone into fine gravel before throwing it.

This is one part of the appeal behind free/open source software and its equivalents in other media: faced with the option of buying and using expensive, restrictive proprietary product and breaking the law by piracy or illegally decompiling and hacking the code, the third option being to write software that's specifically designed to be distributed and hacked at will. Of course the idea has its roots well before proprietary, closed-source software, but the principle remains.

There are plenty of third options to run Linux while still keeping Windows around. The classic method is dual booting, installing Windows and Linux and separate hard drive partitions. Another way is running a distro live off of a CD or USB key. Yet another way is running it in a virtual machine. If you just want the command line tools to run inside of Windows, you can just install something like Cygwin.

It’s was suggested that the Khazar Kingdom chose to adopt the Jewish religion as a third option between the Christian faith of Russia and the Islamic faith of the Turks.

At the proclamation of PrussianKing Wilhelm I as the first Emperor of a united Germany in Versailles in 1871, the Prussian leadership was split as to how to proclaim Wilhelm. Bismarck and the King's other advisors wanted to subtly declare him the "Deutscher Kaiser" ("German Emperor") - a phrasing which would downplay his actual power in the Reich and make it easier for the other member states to accept his title. Wilhelm himself, however, stubbornly wanted the proclamation to pompously style him as "Kaiser von Deutschland" ("Emperor of Germany"), which would imply that he would have exactly those kinds of powers, and as a result piss off the Southern German States (Bavaria in particular) into possibly not joining the new Reich out of protest. The Third Option? He was eventually proclaimed "Kaiser Wilhelm" - no more, no less. Thus, no side was pissed off too much, and the finer details were left to be thoroughly discussed at a later point.

Put up with the high prices, generally poor customer service, and limited DVRs of cable, or the high prices, slower Internet speeds, and weather-related clarity issues or outages of satellite? More and more people are choosing to do away with either, and instead watch TV through online services like Hulu Plus or Netflix, or simply stick to over-the-air broadcast networks like ABC, that can be picked up with an antenna.

At the end of World War II, after the Japanese surrender was signed but before it was formally broadcast, there was an attempted coup by the War Ministry staff and part of the Imperial Guard in order to prevent the surrender. The plotters had been counting on the then-War Minister, Shizukichi Tanaka, to support them. But Tanaka —faced with the options of either joining in a coup against the Emperor, or being party to a dishonorable surrender—chose instead to convince them to stop said coup... and commit suicide few days later.

On Wikipedia, nearly anything can be nominated for deletion articles, user pages, images, policy/guideline pages and anything else in the "Wikipedia" namespace (their equivalent of Administrivia), etc. These discussions ideally go one of two ways: "keep" or "delete". However, there can also be other outcomes: "Withdrawn" (the nominator changes their mind and no one else in the discusion objects), "Merge" (the content is combined with another related article), "No consensus" (the discussion has been open for a while without a clear consensus forming), "Speedy keep" (the nomination is obvious trolling, or otherwise does not present a valid argument for deletion), or "Speedy delete" (the content being nominated meets one or more criteria that allow it to be deleted instantly without any need for discussion most commonly used for vandalism and copyright violations).

A third gender option is gaining worldwide traction. Those who don't feel particularly male OR female (regardless of whether or not they were born with ambiguous genitalia) are using other words to describe themselves. "Non-Binary" is the umbrella term used for all these identities—or at least it is in the USA. Some other countries already have legitimized Third Options:

In Australia, the issue went all the way to the Australian High Court, and they ruled in favor of the third-option-takers. Gender is now much more of a legal non-issue (although not a COMPLETE non-issue quite yet).

There is, of course, the old joke that there are in fact FOUR genders: "Male," "Female," "Don't know," and "Don't care."

When some atheists are confronted with the Lewis's trilemma or "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" dilemma that is supposed to prove Jesus Christ is divine, they respond with something like "You're forgetting one more option, "Legend."

Alternative Title(s):

Taking A Third Option, Took A Third Option, Take The Third Option, Third Option

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